The title of Carolyn Curry’s latest book, Sudden Death, is a play on words. The suddendeath rule in sports means a game continues in overtime until a winner is determined by any new scoring. But in Curry’s book, sudden death occurs when a coach is murdered on the playing field at a championship football game in front of a capacity crowd.
No one but Curry could have written this book. She was in the trenches with her husband, Coach Bill Curry, when he was an NFL player, a winning college football coach at the universities of Alabama, Kentucky, and Georgia Tech, and when he even came out of retirement to initiate the Georgia State University football program.
Football was in Bill’s blood, and Carolyn Curry walked the walk and suffered the stress and trials of what coaching brings, and she makes these all very real for the reader.
In Sudden Death, the central characters are young, handsome Hawaiian-born Jonathan Astin, known by his nickname, “Duke,” referring to a famous Hawaiian surfer, and his new wife, Kendall. Strongminded, independent Kendall (one “L” or two) left Georgia to attend UCLA, where she and Duke meet. They had both planned to go to law school, but Duke can’t resist an offer to instill in young men the love of football and character traits that being a top player requires. Meanwhile, Kendall earns her law degree and focuses on helping those caught in the epidemic of spousal abuse.
As a historian, Curry has always been drawn to strong women who grow stronger by overcoming great difficulty. Her book highlights that for an enduring marriage, partners have to recognize there are times to give and take so both can be the person they were created to be.
Another theme that Curry weaves throughout her book are problems associated with gambling and addiction that can make football coaches a target for revenge. You would think it is enough for a coach to bring his team to victory to make fans happy, but when Duke opts to let time run out and not try to increase the score to cover the betting spread, he finds out it’s easy to make enemies even by winning games. Dangerous enemies.
Curry set out to tell the stories of brave men and women who try to do the right thing and dedicated the book to her husband, who—she is quick to point out—is alive and well.
- Contributed by Janet Kelhoffer, Georgia Writers Museum